Mr. Paradise A Novel (9 page)

“Well have to wait and see.”

“It’s sure eye-catching, exposed like that.
Richard’s been filling me in,” Wendell said. “So who did it? Come on, Frank, you must’ve been here an hour by now.”

Delsa handed him the two plastic cards.

“I want to know who’s dead first.”

Wendell took his time looking from the photos to the dead girl. “I thought she was Kelly Barr?”

“According to Montez. But which one do you say she is, from the photos?”

“I could go either way.”

“That’s what Val said.”

“What about the houseman, Uncle Ben?”

“He goes along with Montez.”

“Why would he say it’s Kelly if it’s Chloe? You got the other girl upstairs. Didn’t she tell you she’s Chloe?”

“If you’re supposed to believe this one’s Kelly, you assume the other one’s Chloe.”

“Frank, I didn’t think you assume anything.”

“I said, ‘Miss Robinette?’ She didn’t say no, I’m Kelly. I asked if they were prostitutes. She says no, but without acting insulted. I asked if she was one of Paradiso’s girlfriends. No.”

“Wait now,” Harris said. “Lloyd the houseman says Chloe’s the regular girlfriend. Kelly, he’s not sure he’s seen her before tonight. They been other cheerleaders come with Chloe. I put it to Montez, ‘These two come here much?’ Says whenever Mr. Paradise wants their company. Then how come Lloyd isn’t sure about Kelly? Montez says he’s old, can’t remember shit. Or Lloyd goes to bed before they get here.”

“You need to sit this Montez down,” Wendell said. “Find out what he gets out of this man being dead. Montez is your focus, and it sounds like he’s telling you anything he wants. Says both girls are hookers. The one upstairs says they aren’t.” Wendell turned to the chair. “If this one didn’t sell it, she was sure a fun-loving little girl, huh? You ever see a bush like that wasn’t in a garden?” He turned to Delsa. “The one upstairs have her drawers on?”

“Panties and bra,” Delsa said. “Montez says she’s in shock. Dermot Cleary, first on the scene, thinks so too. Jackie Michaels was with her a few minutes, says she never was in shock. She might’ve put it on for Dermot so she wouldn’t have to talk to him.”

Wendell lifted his beige cap and placed it on his head again, loose, low in front. “She act straight with you?”

“Montez fixed her a bong, he said to settle her down. And she’s got a buzz on from drinking.”

“She a mess?”

“She knows she’s half in the bag, talkative, so she’s trying to hold herself down. Jackie thought she was a little goofy. I think she’s scared to death and using the buzz to cover it up. Like trying to be funny with her friend dead, right downstairs. She knows how it happened or has a pretty good idea, or saw something that ties in Montez Taylor, this guy with fuckin egg all over his face. I think he got to her, warned her to keep her mouth shut.”

Wendell was nodding.

“Because if she didn’t know anything,” Delsa said, “she’d still be scared, but she’d be telling us what it was like seeing
her friend dead, how it affected her and go on about that. This girl’s watching her step.”

“Being threatened could be enough,” Wendell said. “You gonna house Montez tonight?”

“I’d rather ask him to stop by in the morning,” Delsa said. “Let him stroll in thinking he’s a friendly witness, then jump him.”

“It’s your case,” Wendell said.

“The other thing,” Delsa said. “I don’t want this girl identified in our statement. Not till the one upstairs tells me who she is.”

T
HE UNIFORM, LEANING AGAINST
the wall opposite the open bedroom door, straightened as Delsa came along the hall. Her coat was open and she hooked her thumbs in her gunbelt.

Delsa stopped. “You think the girl in there could be a hooker?”

“What, you mean by looking at her? I’ll say yeah, she could, without ever seeing any like her in the Seventh.”

“What about the girl downstairs?”

“Well, yeah, the way somebody left her, but you still can’t tell for sure. Good girls fuck, too, don’t they?”

Delsa sent the uniform downstairs and stepped in the bedroom to see the one who was supposed to be Chloe sitting on the side of the bed smoking a cigarette, light from the bathroom in her hair, soft-looking, no longer spiked, her face in
lamplight, the mask of makeup gone, a different girl looking up at him, but with eyes he recognized.

“More questions, Frank?”

He believed he could get used to that.

He shook his head.

“I’m taking you home.”

TEN

THE WAY IT WORKED, A CONTRACT WOULD
fall into Avern Cohn’s lap and he’d put Carl Fontana and Art Krupa on it.

Avern was one of those Clinton Street lawyers who hung out at the Frank Murphy and picked up criminal cases assigned by the court—where he first met Fontana and Krupa on separate homicide arraignments. Avern called himself their agent and took 20 percent off the top of fifty thousand, the minimum he charged for a professional hit. The people who wanted somebody taken out could afford it, all of them in the drug business. Fifty grand was what, the wholesale price of two and a half keys to get rid of competition or pay somebody back.

At one of the early meetings when they discussed the deal, having drinks at the Caucus Club, Fontana said, “I thought agents only got ten percent.”

Avern said, “What we’ll be doing isn’t exactly show
business. You walk in where I tell you the guy will be, shoot him or throw him out a window and collect the balance, your twenty grand each. What I have to do for half that much is find you the job. I can’t advertise, can I? Like I’m one of those personal injury fuckheads. I can’t appeal to the little housewife whose husband beats her up every time he gets drunk. And she can’t run an ad in the Help Wanted. So I have to deal with people who shoot each other.”

It answered Art Krupa’s question, why Avern didn’t get jobs from ordinary people who wanted somebody whacked. Art said, “But they’re out there. Carl knows one.”

“Yeah, my wife Connie,” Fontana said. “She happens to come to you, turn her the fuck down.”

Avern loved these guys he had brought together. They never saw a problem with a job. Walk in Baby Sister’s Kitchen, pop the guy eating his farm-raised catfish and walk out. Pop the guy’s bodyguard while they’re at it. They didn’t do drugs to excess, and they were both racist enough to feel more than comfortable about taking out black guys and ethnics, like Chicanos and Chaldeans.

Avern had represented Carl Fontana for killing a man with a slug barrel mounted on his Remington. What happened: this guy Carl knew from church shot a deer up by Northville. It was out of season so they left right away, brought the deer to the guy’s house and hung it on the garage over a washtub. They drank a bottle of Jim Beam while the deer bled out. Carl’s statement: “Here’s this guy doesn’t know shit about dressing a buck, he’s hacking at it with this big fuckin Bowie knife. All I said to him was, ‘You don’t cut the steaks till you
have him dressed out, asshole,’ and he come at me with the knife.”

Not a week later Avern represented Art Krupa for the fatal shooting of a black guy during an argument—in a Seven Mile bar on Martin Luther King Day. Krupa was connected to the Outfit at the time, collecting street taxes from bookmakers, but the shooting had nothing to do with his job. Krupa said it was just one of those things. “I had no intention of taking the smoke out when we started talking. The guy must’ve been offended by something I said about Dr. King, broke off a beer bottle and I had no choice.”

Manslaughter with a firearm could get them each fifteen years. Avern worked a deal: they drew the Southern Michigan Prison at Jackson, Fontana forty-two months, Krupa, forty.

While they were down a client came to Avern complaining about drive-bys fucking up his business. “Man, nobody wants to walk in a crack house all shot up.” Avern thinking about a professional hit man service: relieve the client, who’d be an immediate suspect, from being involved. Hire bad guys to hit bad guys. Why not? Contracts without contracts. He could reach in his files not even looking and pull out shooters, but they were mostly all kids, gangbangers, hard to control. He thought of Carl and Art, both at Jackson in D Block, grown men, white, unaffiliated. Not big guys but tough monkeys, both of them. He’d tell them to look each other up, and if they hit it off come see him, he had something for them.

Carl Fontana was fifty-two, five-seven, wiry, losing his sandy hair, a bricklayer who hated doing patios with designs to figure out. But thirty years ago in Vietnam Carl was a tunnel
rat, his size getting him the job. Crawl into a hole with a .45 and a flashlight. Carl said, “I can’t tell you how fuckin scary it was.” But he did it, he went in. He came home and did county time for raising hell, a couple of aggravated assaults, before settling down with the bricks. Carl told Avern you didn’t just lay ’em one on top the other, each brick was different.

Arthur Krupa, forty-eight, five-nine, stocky, came out of high school wanting to be a gangster or a movie star who played gangsters. He didn’t know anybody in Hollywood, but had an uncle who was connected. Art pulled a store burglary to prove himself and his uncle got him in. But, Jesus, it was boring collecting from the books, have to listen to ’em bitch and call him names in foreign tongues. Art thought he looked like John Gotti, but no one else did.

That time at the Caucus Club Avern ordered another round the same way, martini with anchovy olives, a couple of Molsons with shots of Crown Royal on the side. These guys were blue-collar down to their white socks.

Avern said, “If I can get you five a year that’s a hundred grand each. But five might not be possible. You’re gonna have leisure time in between. You might want to look into home invasions, see if you like it.”

Art said, “I’ve done it.”

Avern said, “You’ll be shooting criminals if you need to think about it.”

Art said, “I ‘magine mostly smokes.”

Avern said, “You don’t see a problem picking up guns?”

Art said, “In this town?”

Avern said, “Barbra Streisand sang here at the Caucus when she was eighteen years old.” Avern was sixty-one, active in a theater group. “I remember her doing ‘Happy Days Are Here Again’ real slow.”

T
HEY’D BEEN IN BUSINESS
now a year and a half, five home invasions that paid okay, but only four hits. They blew another one trying to pop the guy in his car, firing at him doing sixty up Gratiot and the fucker spun out of control and got hit by a truck. They had a shotgun now for when they’d try him again. The hits were three black guys—first you had to find the fuckers, never where Avern said to look—and a Chaldean drug dealer who owned a gas station/convenience store. There were a bunch of Chaldeans in Southfield, Carl said, from Iraq, towelheads but they weren’t Muslims. Art had dealt with Chaldean bookies. He said what’s the difference, a fuckin towelhead’s a towelhead.

Avern told them about the next hit saying it would be the easiest one yet. “The front door’s unlocked. Walk in and shoot the old man and walk out. Make it look like you broke in. The houseman, Lloyd, will be in bed. Montez, the contractor”—Avern no longer called the one paying for the hit a client—-”lives there but won’t be around. He says he’ll pay you in two days, meet you at a motel on Woodward.” Avern saying, “I got the name of it here someplace.”

They were in Avern’s office on the twentieth floor of the Penobscot Building, drawings of old guys in wigs and robes on the wall behind him, like cartoons but weren’t funny.
Carl watched him looking for the note on his desk and asked why this Montez couldn’t have the money ready, at the time.

“I just told you he won’t be around, doesn’t want it to look like he’s involved in any way.” Avern said, “Here it is,” and handed the note across the desk to Art. “The University Inn, near Wayne.”

“This Montez isn’t a dealer,” Carl said, “but can put his hands on forty grand, cash?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Yeah, well, you’re all set,” Carl said. “How’d he know you could get this done for him?”

“I’d see Montez at Randy’s, different places. When he was a kid I used to represent him at Frank Murphy arraignments, get him a plea deal. Now we have a drink and talk. He asks my advice about things, his future.”

“He ask you how to get his boss knocked off?”

Carl felt Avern was holding back, not telling the whole story. He listened to Avern saying the old man was feeble, incontinent. Changing his diapers, feeding him, had become a full-time job. “The old man wanted Montez to whack him, put him out of his misery, but Montez couldn’t do it. He was ready to die, so Montez agreed to find somebody. I accept that as his reason,” Avern said, “and thought, why not help out, make a few bucks.”

Art said, “Come on, let’s go.”

Carl said, “Montez is getting something out of this.”

Avern said, “Well, yeah, he’s in the old guy’s will. He must be.”

But didn’t say a word about a girl sitting in the chair with him topless, her jugs and her face painted.

F
ROM THE START
C
ARL
had a bad feeling about this one. First listening to Avern making it look simple, and now in the Anchor Bar, talking to Connie on the phone till she hung up on him. Going back to the table, Art sitting there with a rum and Diet Coke watching the hockey game on TV, Carl wanted to blame Connie for how he felt.

Art said, “Fuckin Wings, man. Yzerman scored, they’re up four two over the Rangers.”

Carl sat down and picked up his Seven and Seven. “I got two calls, but she won’t tell me who they were.”

“Connie?”

“I told her I’d drop off a bottle of vodka and I forgot. She goes, ‘You don’t do nothing for me, I don’t do nothing for you.’ “

Art said, “She’s got a car, for Christ sake.”

“They took her license again, third D.U.I. in the last year and a half. I tell her, ‘Jesus Christ, can’t you drink without getting smashed every time?’ She goes, ‘What would be the point?’ “